Research Articles: All posts tagged 'persia'

The Battle of Thermopylae is one of the most heroic battles in the annals of military history. Three hundred Spartan soldiers, lead by their king Leonidas, engaged in a mission of “suicidal self-sacrifice” by holding off the mighty Persian army for three days at the pass at Thermopylae which was no more than 20 yards wide. This battle has been made into a Hollywood movie entitled, simply, “300” (2006).

This past month, for the third year in a row, I again participated in the half-marathon race as part of the 2010 Baltimore (Maryland) Running Festival. Just for the record, running does not really describe what I did, and this year was my worst effort to date. But enough about me, participation in the event prompted me to consider a bit more carefully the origin of the event, which led me back to Queen Esther. My own academic work and interests have always been in the earlier periods of Biblical history. In fact, I have tended to consider the Persian period as modern history. I have had minimal contact with Persian material in my archaeological field work and my interest in that period has basically centered on my annual cycle teaching the book of Esther.

The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the most important discoveries in biblical archaeology. She was aroused from her 2,400-year sleep in the ruins of Babylon in 1879 by Hormuzd Rassam. Rassam, an evangelical Christian, was a native Iraqi born in 1826 in Mosul, across the Tigris River from the remains of ancient Nineveh. He met the famous British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1841. Layard recognized Rassam’s potential and became his patron. Under Layard’s tutelage, Rassam developed into a competent archaeologist, becoming a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Society of Biblical Archaeology and the Victoria Institute. In 1876, with the help of Layard, who was now the British ambassador to Turkey, he obtained a permit from the Turkish government to conduct archaeological investigations in Assyria and Babylonia on behalf of the British Museum.

The recent surprise success of the movie 300 and the amount of controversy it engendered once again reminds us of the power of movie-making and history and its impact on modern conceptions of national, ethnic and religious identity. How accurate is Hollywood's retelling of one of the most famous battles of antiquity?